1954: Denise Labbé falls madly in love with Jacques Algarron. He persuades Denise to drown her two-year-old daughter to prove his devotion. 1956: Priest Yves Denoyer shoots his young mistress, rips open her stomach, baptizes their unborn child and kills him, disfiguring his face. 1957: Simone Deschamps, on the orders of Doctor Evenou, puts on a black a robe over a naked body and stabs his sleeping wife to death.

The philosopher Marcel Jouando, who described these three ritual murders, saw in them magical acts committed under the influence of incomprehensible forces that control our fate.

When you are faced with events of this kind, in which life is revealed in all its fullness and in all its cruelty, in which reality pulsates and trembles like an open wound, how can you waste time reading fictional novels, no matter how well written?